Katzenberg: Goodbye text in social media, hello video

DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg is helping build his movie business by spending about a day a week in Silicon Valley, and he’s hoping a little Hollywood glitz will rub off on the area’s techheads.

The intiatives DreamWorks is working on– particularly in an ongoing collaboration with Intel– ” will have great application in social media,” he told the audience at the Techonomy conference in Tucson, Ariz. He envisions a future where much social media moves from text-based communication to video- and audio-based, making it more intuitive and instinctual.

The project with Intel will also make animation more efficient. Right now, Katzenberg told the gasping audience, an expert animator typically can create just three seconds of animation a week; an animated movie takes over four years to put together.

A little Silicon Valley is rubbing off on Katzenberg, too. He credited his role on the board of gaming company Zynga with getting him to think in more playful, collaborative terms. “We are at the absolute intersection of Silicon Valley and Hollywood in terms of storytelling,” he said.